CFP: [Victorian]

MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH â€" extended deadline 22/01/08A workshop exploring how life is managed, commodified and objectifiedTuesday, March 4, 2008Munk Centre at the University of Toronto.

An interdisciplinary group of graduate students at the University ofToronto is organizing - Matters of Life and Death - in order to grapplewith key questions on the theoretical horizon in many disciplines:What constitutes life and how is this life managed, commodified, andobjectified? Why do we count the death of a Canadian soldier insteadof the life of an Afghani civilian? Does life matter differently inlaboratories than it does in the community? Does life matter more inthe hospital room than it does on the battlefields of Iraq?

Building from, yet moving beyond Foucaultâ€™s biopolitics and biopowerand Marxâ€™s materialist view of life within the structures of labourand value, this workshop will grapple with questions thattheoretically and materially categorize â€œlifeâ€. While a politicalproject around death seems implausible, the definition of good,healthy, and wealthy lives is always in continuous distinction fromthose who are allowed to die or suffer. Hence, life and the politicsof life is not easily defined or solidified into concreteexpressions/formations/variables.

Our workshop will provide a forum for graduate students researchingquestions concerning the politics of life and death. These frameworksare ones that, broadly speaking, seek to chart the ways in which themanagement of life and living beings is central to political projectsand economic strategies. Attention to the politics of life and ofdeath is a theoretical perspective used by scholars across variousdisciplines in the humanities and social sciences to address a broadrange of issuessuch as the production of economic and political inequality, therelationships between health and politics, the creation ofmarginalized populations, and the relationship between gender, class,and race. In order to understand the multiple ways in which humanpopulations and living beings are represented and governed bypolitical and economic projects, a dialogue that crosses cultural anddisciplinary boundaries is crucial.

We welcome an expansive series of topics and disciplines and we hopeto foster diverse, supportive, and critical engagements with thepolitics of life and death. From populations to bodies, bio-capital tocyborgs, brine shrimp to urban decay, resistance to regulation,immigration to securitization, inquiries will explore the politics oflife. Graduate students from a wide array of disciplines are invitedto participate in this workshop. We especially welcome those who seekto investigate a similar problem from divergent analytic perspectives.Life is not easily categorized and thus academic approaches are noteither.

In bringing together different voices to explore the politics of lifewe ask the following questions:+ What constitutes life as the basis of a political/critical/progressiveproject?+ What is the relationship between capitalism, regulation and the State?+ What is the relationship between the macro/population and themicro/genetic?+ How are illness, disease and natural disasters related to the controlof populations?+ How are developments in the life sciences related to the managementof populations?+ How is the value of life determined?

Abstracts of 250 words and a short CV should be submitted tolifeanddeath2008_at_gmail.com by January 22nd, 2008.